05 January 2019 10:10 AM

Saturday PS: Future imperfect

THE future, declared Yogi Berra of baseball fame, is not what it used to be. Somehow, you know just what he meant.

I’m not going over again the fact that the hotels in space, colonies on the Moon and personal jet-packs that were (sort of) forecast when I was a small child in the Sixties have failed to appear, true though this is. Rather, some apparently-irresistible trends appear to have been, er, resisted.

Here’s an example. It is not so long ago, as crime rates sank on both sides of the Atlantic, that we were told this was the pattern of the future. Some put the decline of violence down to the removal of lead from petrol, or the expansion of higher education or even the legalisation of abortion (generations of crime-prone youths were simply not born in the first place).

Harvard academic Steven Pinker had a couple of extra explanations: that growing feminine influence in western societies bore down upon violent crime and that the rule of law increasingly persuaded people to outsource revenge to the state. And a market economy made people more valuable to each other alive than dead.

I don’t know in detail how things are working out for our American friends, but the current crime wave in this country suggests this inevitable civilising process has proved somewhat evitable.

Then there was the alleged redundancy of war in the era after the 1990 Peace of Paris. Even the Gulf War the following year was seen as re-affirming this principle rather than undermining it, by giving notice to dictators that their time was up.

True, the obituary for warfare has been written prematurely in the past. But rarely with the fervour of the period immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the title of a book about that era, it was a time “when the world seemed new”.

That didn’t really work out, did it?

Nor was the 1990 Paris agreement entirely about peace. It also enshrined the post-Cold War supremacy of a market economy. “We stress that economic co-operation based on [a] market economy constitutes an essential element of our relations and will be instrumental in the construction of a prosperous and united Europe.”

Trillions of dollars in bank bailouts and “quantitative easing” later, how’s that going?

It would be too easy to enquire after the fate of another great “inevitable” project, the euro. So instead, let’s look at the demise of a phenomenon that seemed so well-established as to be barely worth mentioning, the “refreshing irreverence” of our “wonderfully-uninhibited young people”. I may have been one of them, for a bit, a long time ago, although I preferred “refreshed” to “refreshing”.

How irreverent and uninhibited can they be in their “safe spaces” whimpering about “micro-aggression” (or people talking, as we used to call it)?

Finally, the “inevitable” triumph of the trade unions, sweeping middle-class professionals into their ranks, seems to have been postponed.

Saturday miscellany

IN conversation on television, many years ago, Ben Elton recalled a stand-up routine that included the line (I think this is right): “I was looking through my fridge the other day…” One night, he was a little underpowered and from the audience came a shout of: “No you weren’t.”

The heckler was right, said Elton. By just a few degrees, he had fallen short in his delivery and the narrative was broken.

This came back to me over the festive season when reading Susan Hill’s latest novel in the Simon Serrailler crime series The Comforts of Home (Penguin; 2018). Spoiler alert, but when we learn that her detective hero has had an arm amputated, I wanted to say: “No he didn’t.”

Sorry, but this was well below par for what is generally an excellent series. It wasn’t helped by a (mercifully brief) brush with “trans issues”.

ON which subject, previously-staunch Matthew Parris seems to be softening in the latest issue of The Spectator. Or maybe some all-round sagginess is an inevitable by-product of having had a bumper Christmas-New Year edition now trying to turn something out in the wastes of early January. Also inside, Lloyd Evans talks to James Graham, a playwright whose drama Brexit: An Uncivil War is broadcast on Channel 4 on Monday. Evans describes the dramatist as “a Remainer himself”. No kidding? That’s amazing. He adds: “The resulting film…is self-evidently told from a Remain viewpoint...” Of course it is. It’s being shown on Channel 4.

BEYOND parody was the series of Army recruitment adverts unveiled in The Daily Telegraph on Thursday. One declares, quite seriously: “Snowflakes. Your Army needs you and your compassion.” Others are in a similar vein. Putin? IS? Xi Jinping? It’s over for you guys. Over.

THIS seems to be the season for learning sad news about the demise of people once known. Last week it was the journalist Nyta Mann, with whom I spent a very enjoyable day at Goldsmiths College an age ago. Now it is the writer, artist and librarian Michael Richardson, whose death I found reported in the Toronto Star. Before emigrating, Michael was on my father’s staff at Cannon Street Library in London and became a good friend of the family. He even tried to teach me to fish, a doomed pursuit.

Finally, what joy to learn of the (admittedly modest) comeback for the cassette tape. I’ve still got a large collection of both pre-recorded and self-recorded cassettes and still think the format – its size and shape – is pretty zippy. An age thing, no doubt.